In 1977, I think it was, P.J. O’Rouke wrote a hilarious and controversial review of a $70,000 Aston-Martin Volante for Car & Driver. In that review O’Rourke famously wrote that he couldn’t give an accurate take on the nuances of the car’s performance threshold. O’Rourke said something to the effect of — and I’m paraphrasing here – that he drove the car “like it had a trunk full of live babies and you would, too, if you were in someone else’s $70,000 car.”

Being a young, impressionable kid, I thought that was funny.

Flash ahead 36 years and I now understand exactly what he meant.

That’s because I recently spent a week with a 2013 Rolls-Royce Ghost Extended Wheelbase, which carried a base price of $296,000 and an as-tested priced of $356,770, which is roughly double the median housing price in Cabarrus County, N.C., the place that I call home. And as you can imagine, in the little 5,000-person town where I live, the big Rolls-Royce stood out like Miley Cyrus twerking in a Baptist church on Sunday morning.